re: DirecTV or Dish?

DirecTV vs Dish...

Technology:

DTV uses Ka bands for its HD channels. Dish uses Ku bands. DTV is more susceptible to rain fade. Ka bands beam down at 18 GHz. Ku beams down from 10.75 GHz to 12.7 GHz.

The Hopper 3 crushes the Genie, and it isn't even close. 16 tuners, a voice remote that you can buy for $30 that actually works, the first 72 channels of SiriusXM (on good packages), YouTube and Netflix are integrated as well.

Programming:

It's virtually the same. If you want NFL Sunday Ticket, get DirecTV. Dish is also notorious for getting into carriage disputes, but they do that to keep the prices as low as possible for the customer. DirecTV is owned by at&t, so they just raise your bill.

If Dish raises your price after 2 years, switch to DirecTV for 2 years, and swap back to Dish in 2 years. People do that here in Houston all the time. It's just a carousel among the 4 (sometimes 5 or 6) providers in order to get the cheapest price.

One thing I believe that will happen before too much longer is Dish will have to start offering some type of customer retention price in order to keep subscribers. They haven't been doing that, but they lost over 130K subscribers in Q1 this year. It's a smaller company, so that hit them pretty hard. Charlie Ergen needs to wake up, smell the coffee and stop buying wireless spectrum they're not going to use in the immediate future or there won't be a future.